Commonplace Book

During the Enlightenment era in Europe, many people who read a lot used to maintain a “commonplace book”. Commonplace what? That was the practice of noting down interesting passages from one’s reading. How’s that different from a scrapbook, you ask? Well, it’s what they did next that made things interesting.

They created systems to index the commonplace book’s contents. But not just an ordinary alphabetical index. Instead, they created systems of indexing with a large degree of order and a small degree of chaos. Like John Locke’s system of placing an item using its first letter and first subsequent vowel (instead of its second letter). Thus EPISTOLA would be placed under E. i. (‘E’ being its first letter, ‘i’ the first vowel after the first letter).

That seems weird. What’s the point of such a system? It resulted in unrelated topics being listed next to each other. Which would sometimes result in finding unexpected new links of association between topics.

But does anyone do anything like this anymore? The surprising answer is that today everyone has access to such a commonplace book. And you don’t even restrict yourself to stuff you have already read! How? When you search for any topic on Google, you get a bunch of snippets (the top 10 search results). Read a few of those snippets and you could potentially have found a new, interesting association among topics. Google is today’s commonplace book!

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